I know there are people who have 5 children in 7 years. How many of them try home schooling with little or no extra help? Unless there are multiple births involved at least one, probably more, will be school age by the time no. 5 comes along. She was supposed to be teaching 5 & 7 year olds to read while nursing maybe? Notice her first post-partum depression set in about the time no.1 should have been going off to school and when no.4 came she had no home of her own? It sounds to me like more pressure than hormonal imbalance; pressures the father could at have helped alleviate but may actually have created.

Ultimately the official investigators should be talking to a lot more people than those who talk to the media. There will be no official recommendation for 30 days. The trial will, no doubt, bring in family members who have a much better picture of her life the past 7 years than we can glean from brief news articles.

Perhaps the value of all this speculation is not in what happens to the Yates family, but helping to sensitize all of us to the possibility of these kinds of situations existing around us. Maybe we can try to learn what we can do to help them in their time of need. It's great to talk about being supportive, but some of us don't know how.

We've heard that Andrea needed support, but how do we know & what can we do? The neighbors barely knew the family, but respecting privacy is a really important value these days. Someone who'd been a friend since 8th grade & gone to with her nursing school & her wedding, admitted "that the two had not spoken in several years." Hmm, I can think of a couple of people I've been too busy to be in touch with for a while.

It sounds like they may have been religious & attempting to live those values as they understood them, but not involved in a church. I know it's popular to say we can be religious/spiritual without going to church, but maybe church participation could have helped create the community they did not seem to have otherwise.